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About the Lab

Housed in the School of Disability Studies, at the Faculty of Community Services, the Disability Publics Lab hosts multi-media and digital initiatives committed to bringing in disabled, Deaf, mad, fat, aging, and otherwise differently embodied and enminded participants into mutual, interdependent, critical, and collaborative research spaces. 

A photo taken at the Dispatches from Disabled Country book launch. There are a crowd of people sitting, some masked, other not. An ASL Interpreter is at the front. There is a computer screen monitor showing a video of Catherine Frazee, a disabled woman. There is an open microphone in the foreground.

Photo from the Dispatches from Disabled Country book launch event with Catherine Frazee. Credit: Lisa East

Lab Focus

Accessibility

Part of the Lab’s efforts are directed towards accessible community-based research and adjoined knowledge mobilization. In the Disability Publics Lab, we understand accessibility as 1) expansive and 2) relational.  

  1. Accessibility is expansive and more than a standard list of procedures. We seek to welcome and anticipate differently embodied and enminded peoples into the lab by actively reducing barriers to research and participation. 
  2. We also think of access as relational, meaning that we create accessibility collectively through our everyday interactions with co-researchers, participants, and partners.  

The Disability Publics Lab offers resources, methodologies, and knowledge dissemination that work across digital and physical spaces. 

A key goal of the Lab is to facilitate public scholarship that extends beyond the walls of the university to engage publics in the exploration, debate, and possible re-imaginings of contemporary social issues. Therefore, we also take up and build on the extensive online scholarly and activist practices of differently embodied and enminded peoples through multiple digital platforms.

 

The Disability Publics Lab engages and welcomes in research projects across disciplines. Interdisciplinary research and organizing in the Lab are built on an intersectional social justice approach where we attend to the differences that emerge in disabled, Deaf, and mad experience and identity through race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, age, class, and geographic location. A key tenant of this approach is working from the multiple, complex, and culturally distinct ways that people who experience impairment and difference do (or do not) come to disability.

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